Praneet Akilla & Angel Glady in Kainchee Lagaa | Photos by Jeremy Mimnagh
Disclosure time: I’m drawn to stories that feature incest. Oh boy, that looks super weird in cold, plain text. I should clarify some specifics. I’m deeply fascinated when it’s between consenting individuals (even if the impulse is naive, fraught or delusional), stories which are neither moralistic nor teeming with sensationalistic rhetoric. I appreciate unguarded acknowledgement of sexuality, without overt or subtextual kink-shaming. Oh! And I really love slow-burn narratives that defy anticipation, that drag me along a murky path that doesn’t allow me the comfort of being, hmmm… ahead of the storyteller, if y’know what I mean.
Zaiba Baig’s Begging Brown Bitch Plays satisfy all of these narrative fetishes. Presented by House of Beida and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Kainchee Lagaa & Jhooti, are a provocative double bill—playful, ominous and raw.
Director Tawiah Ben M’Carthy establishes a persuasively rich and textured environment for the characters to inhabit as they negotiate layers of truth and performativity. At the top, Rachel Forbes’ set is a labyrinthine, cloistered network of wooden poles and catwalks, draped with cables and fabrics depicting a modest little flat tucked into a seedy urban pocket of Lahore, India. André du Toit’s lush lighting gives it vivid colour and warmth. Split at an acute angle before the cornered stage, each section of the audience is intensely aware of our specific perspective.
In Kainchee Lagaa, we meet sex worker, Billo (Angel Glady), lounging away with tandoori chicken and Fanta, burping and pissing and meeting with clients. She’s unapologetically brash and bawdy, asserting herself through impish goading—of her clients and us, her trapped audience. She wants our attention, though our money is better, as she forcefully thrusts a collection bowl at us—coaxing, taunting, threatening, exhausting all tactics.
Glady is giddy and and flamboyant, but there are hints of sadness, desperation and danger. As she admonishes and amuses us, her estranged brother, Arsalan (Praneet Akilla), makes his way from Canada to reunite with her. For most of the play’s duration, I found him the most compelling. Baig has given him rapid-fire, rambling text, rife with stumbling, staccato rhythms. Spitting out the most outlandish stuff, Akilla’s relentless, manic energy and goofy charisma caught me off guard and won me over.
When finally in the same space together, their trauma bond is a palpable presence in the air, charging it with tension, pain and offbeat humour. Baig has established a symbol—a pair of scissors from the past, manifesting in their present—that figures into a jarring bit magic realism that has intimate, disquieting mythic resonance. I’m still unpacking that. Xina appears as several vivid supporting characters—some funny, some eerie.
Zaiba Baig in Jhooti | Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
In Jhooti, Baig herself takes the stage as Sekeena. With a guttural shriek, she bounds on stage, desperately clutching a plastic bag of belongings, dodging some violent, offstage threat. This introduction is all very reminiscent of an earlier work, Kitne Saare Laloo Yahan Pey Hain, which I caught at the 2020 Next Stage Festival. Though the circumstances seem dire—she’s about to be brutally chopped apart by some angry man—she seems to be, ultimately, taking it in stride. She confides that she’s sort of into it. And we love that for her.
But do we? Does she even mean it? The Bollywood flourishes, the outrageous persona, the coquettish facade and colourful anecdotes—how well do they hold up to scrutiny? Though both plays break the fourth wall, this second piece then goes on to dismantle the foundations of that fourth wall, then interrogates the very space it took up.
Baig and M’Carthy, in disrupting convention, are playing within an invigorating, post-modern theatrical form. Baig drops layer upon layer of deception, establishing a new intimacy and trust with the audience, then breaking that trust with increasing swiftness. These layers of confession sharpen her edges even as her identity becomes less and less definable.
Baig’s fierce, funny and harrowing monologue is a tangled, inconsistent yet self-assured statement of trans personhood—paradoxically both vulnerable and evasive, fully mischievous and somewhat menacing. I was amused and intrigued and turned-on and freaked-out and galvanized! Baig is a captivating presence with urgent insights, arresting eyes and great fucking hair.
And she does get wet. I’ll, uh, leave you to interpret that.
Kainchee Lagaa & Jhooti: The Begging Brown Bitch Plays
April 1 to 18, 2026
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
(12 Alexander Street)
2 hours, 30 minutes
(Kainchee Lagaa, 75 minutes | Jhooti, 60 minutes, plus intermission)
Xina, Angel Glady, & Praneet Akilla in Kainchee Lagaa, Zaiba Baig in Jhooti |
Photos by Jeremy Mimnagh